Headworx

I have recently found this interview with Tony Fadell . Very interesting to watch and learn how great tech stories such as the iPod, the iPhone and the Next started back in the past. The video is more than an hour but I highly recommend watching it. One quote I memorized (citing from memory now) has been this: anything world changing takes a decade; anything less may be a good business but does not change the world... Indeed. But a decade is typically much more than an average investor can bear. That is probably why it is so hard for startups to be in a world changing game. They can never sell such a long story (especially if it is a world changing story, so inherently hard to believe) to investors. On the other hand it is rather foolish if investors expect a world changing results (not just a "good business" in shorter period of time). Wonder what world changing startups is Tony now investing in....?

Satellite connectivity has always been exciting because of the whole globe coverage. But it was bulky and expensive. DeLorme (now part of Garmin) revolutionized this category now for the second time. The first time was in  2014 when they introduced the inReach and flexible two-way messaging plans that could be suspended when not used. That dealt with the "expensive" part. Typically it is a couple of weeks in a year when outdoor travelers need satellite communications. And the plan suspension does exactly that - you pay when you need the service. I have been a subscriber ever since. The second part - the "bulky" remained some sort of a problem. The inReach was not that bulky, but it was adding its almost 250 grams to the backpack. But with the launch of the inReach Mini the bulky part has completely gone. It is now 100 grams and barely bigger than a smartwatch. Garmin also paves the way of using Bluetooth to network devices around a person wearing them. The...

There was this old story in 2007 on a hackers running an FM transmitter that was injecting spoofed RDS-TMC messages fooling GPS navigation systems. Fast forward to 2018 and we have a similar device that injects spoofed satellite signals . Both attacks have roots in the lack of an authentication scheme in GPS. Authentication is often thought of as a less important security feature than encryption. And actually it is otherwise. This is probably because in analog (protein /  human) systems authentication is always implicit. When a person we know calls us, we not only look at the incoming call number. We recognize the voice and other contextual information around that call. Such as was she supposed to call me, was the subject of the conversation known / expected etc. Simple machines do not do such implicit secondary authentication checks. They rely on explicit authentication checks. And if the checks are not present,  the recipient probably has to blindly trust the message. W...

Reading various projects and proposals it still strikes me how wireless architects apply wired design paradigms. That of course leads to sub-par performance. One could say it is like attaching wings to locomotives and hoping they would fly. Wireless, and especially low power wireless, is different. Wireless is inherently lossy. There are a number of reasons to that. In wireless there is interference. The wireless medium is shared, and unlike wired (that is isolated), wireless messages transmitted concurrently on the same frequency collide. And there are many ways to deal with this: implement a multiple access scheme (TDMA, CDMA, CSMA to name the most common) or accepting the fact there will be collisions and designing for that. Multiple access schemes are expensive in many ways, including power (you need clocks or complex heavy math or run a receiver before transmitting). A system that does not implement any multiple access may be equally, or even more effective. But the design m...